Vol. 572 No. 2
112 Aengus Ó Snodaigh asked the Minister for Foreign Affairs his views on the report of the US arms inspector in Iraq and head of the Iraq survey group to the US Congress which indicates that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq despite the deployment of a team of 1,200 personnel and a spend of $300 million to date on this search by the US team alone. [22802/03]
I am aware of the report of Dr. David Kay, head of the Iraq survey group, ISG, to which the Deputy refers. Dr. Kay has said that his group have not yet found stocks of weapons, but they are not yet at the point where they can say definitively that such weapon stocks do not exist. He has also said that the ISG has found significant evidence of continuing Iraqi weapons research and development.
At the time when Security Council Resolution 1441 was adopted, the Security Council was acting in the belief that Iraq did possess weapons of mass destruction. This belief was very widely shared in the international community. The General Affairs Council of the EU at its meeting of 18 to 19 November 2002 could not have been more clear in stating its belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. This was despite the fact that there was disagreement among many member states about how to deal with the situation.
In his report of 6 March to the Security Council, Dr. Blix, head of UNMOVIC, the arms inspection team mandated to investigate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, said that many questions relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction remained unanswered. We still do not have answers to these questions.
